Tjupurru's search for his people and for new music

Tjupurru brought his unique Didjeribone to the Snowy Mountains Festival of Music recently. The Brisbane based Aboriginal musician has developed a synthesis of the traditional Aboriginal didjeridu and cutting edge electronic music technology. He grew up in Papua New Guinea to where in the late nineteenth century his great grandparents were taken by missionaries from their traditional country in Western Australia. After a successful search for his people he then created new music using a radical reinvention of the ancient didjeridu.

Adrian Fabila Tjupurrula was born and bred in Port Moresby, a third generation descendant of Djabera Djabera people who had been taken to New Guinea from the Beagle Bay mission in the Kimberleys.

Although born in New Guinea as had been his parents and grandparents he says that being classified as different, a mixed race person, inspired his desire to reconnect with his heritage.

He was a champion boxer in New Guinea and has memories of being treated not as Papua New Guinean in the ring but as 'the enemy' because he was someone of mixed race.

After moving to Cairns in the 1970s he realised how many of his people had been displaced and he began a search for his origins beginning with the records of the Catholic missionaries.

The first breakthrough was when he found a document that identified his great grandmother as being a Western Australian Aboriginal who was among those taken to Papua New Gunia and then married a Filipino lay missionary.

Then in the late 1990s his older brother found a book in the NSW State Library that had a record of their great grandmother.

Soon after Tjupurru and his family was visiting Broome where he said an old Aboriginal man approached them in a supermarket thinking Tjupurru was a relative.

The old man was mistaken and then when Tjupurru explained his search and that he had found out his great grandmother's name was Rosie Bombay "the old man almost fainted and said 'Where the hell have you guys been?'"

Tjupurru says that the older people had been told to keep an eye out for those families who had gone missing over 100 years earlier.

From that meeting they were able to reconnect with his Djabera Djabera family and people.

Tjupurru began playing didjeridu at school with a plastic vacuum cleaner pipe and years later was inspired by the music of Gonwdanaland and the didj playing of Charlie McMahon.

Charlie McMahon showed that the didjeridu could be an instrument in contemporary music.

He then developed the Didjeribone, a new version of the ancient instrument that uses two plastic pipes, one within the other, that can pitch shift by sliding like a trombone.

He also invented the Face Bass, a seismic sensor that records sounds inside the mouth.

Used together these instruments transform the instrument and create opportunities for totally new sounds.

Tjupurru uses the Didjeribone and the Face Bass together in his live performances to create live samples and loops in what he describes as 21st Century Didjetronica.

In the audio with this story Tjupurru talks about searching for his family in an interview with the ABC's Tim Holt.